On April 17, 1961, in Cuba, the United States of America was meant to be a part of an attack. Very many people were killed and the whole plan turned to utter failure. There are many embarrassing situations in United States’ history such as the Japanese-American Internment during World War II. From failure to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba and losing many Cuban Exiles and American weaponry, decisions that were made to result in the failure to strategies that were proven non-useful in the ordeal are just a few reasons to prove that the Bay of Pigs Invasion was one of the most embarrassing chapters for the U.S.

With friction between the U.S. government and Castro's leftist communist regime increasing, President Dwight Eisenhower was led to take away diplomatic relations with Cuba. The fact that the United States’ government had a growing dislike of Fidel Castro’s communist led to the idea of an invasion attack on Cuba.

“On that unhappy island, as in so many other arenas of the contest for freedom, the news has grown worse instead of better. I have emphasized before that this was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator. While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way,”[1]

Kennedy said this in his speech regarding the planned invasion of Cuba. He speaks of how American Soldiers were to not enter Cuba for the invasion but who was to enter the Bay of Pigs were approximately 1,300 Cuban Exiles armed with U.S. weapons. They landed at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) at the Southern coast of the island of Cuba. In 1959, Fidel Castro had become the leader of Cuba. Castro, a communist, became hostile to the United States two years after he became the Cuban....

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...A Perfect Disaster: The Bay of Pigs Invasion and Realism
D-Day, April 17, 1960; Brigade 2506 lands in the Bay of Pigs, a small beach in southern Cuba. Backed by former president Dwight Eisenhower, endorsed by current president John F. Kennedy, and masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency, the plan to overthrow Fidel Castro, Prime Minister of Cuba, had been months in the making (Dunne 1). By the summer of 1959, as former Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista was overtaken by Castro, charges of communist takeover in Cuba were rampant in Washington, especially in Congress (Dunne 5). With the United States embroiled in the Cold War, a largely ideological battle between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States, the United States’ adopted a policy of containment, in hopes of preventing the spread of communism to the Western Hemisphere. Once communism had spread to Cuba, with Castro being largely influenced by the Soviet Union, the United States had quietly decided to take action to remove Castro from office (Jones 13). As noted in Joshua Sandman’s article, Analyzing Foreign Policy Crisis Situations: The Bay Of Pigs, the CIA pushed forward in planning, as Cuba began receiving large shipments of arms from the Soviet Union (3). As plans for the invasion came together, relations between the two countries slowly deteriorated, culminating on that fateful day when Brigade 2506...

...2013
The Bay of Pigs
On April, 17, 1961 the Bay of Pigs, the biggest foreign affairs disaster in U.S. history, occurred. At first the operation was supported but as the years went by the feelings of it changed, showing mostly in the policy changes of the some of the presidents over the next 49 years.
June 24 1961 reporter Stewart Alsop published an article in the Saturday Evening Post titled “The Lessons of the Cuban Disaster.” In this article Alsop describes what happened at the Bay of Pigs and why though it supported at the operations launch, and how such a short time later it was viewed as a disaster. Alsop explains how he interviewed several officials in Washington and how they supported the operations at its conception but in hindsight view the operation as a failure. These officials in turn told the Alsop that there are several key lessons to learn from this debacle. One such is stated in the article as “The men responsible for mounting a major covert operation like the Cuban landings must not also be responsible for judging the operation’s chance of success or failure”(Alsop p.27).
Alsop wrote this article in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, he views the operation the same as though he interviewed, necessary at the time but in hindsight a failure. In this article he goes over how some of the top officials in Washington admit that they supported...

...Ever since the day Fidel Castro took over Cuba, there have been attempts to remove him from power. These attempts coming mainly from when Eisenhower and Kennedy were in office. Among these attempts included an attempt to poison him and the U.S government even tried to hire the mafia to kill him (Castañeda 264). The closest operation that came to forcing him out of power was an invasion that came to be known as “The Bay of Pigs”. The Bay ofPigs invasion was an unsuccessful attempt by Cuban exiles and the US government to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was to take place on April 17, 1961 by an estimated 1,400 Cubans that were trained by the CIA (). Although the Cuban exiles were the ones who came up with the idea to invade and attempt to force Fidel Castro out of power, it soon became known as a United States government operation because it was financed by the U.S (). The general idea of the plan was for the Cubans to invade through the Bay of Pigs, which is located in the southern part of Cuba, and work their way towards Havana, while the United States government provided air support. The job of the United States Air Force in the invasion was to completely wipe out the small government air base in Cuba with B-26 bombers (Higgins 110). The United States painted the B-26 bombers to look like Cuban military planes so it would look like Castro’s own men...

...The Bay of Pigs Invasion
HIST102 – American History since 1877
Today, April 17, 2013, marks the 52nd anniversary of the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an event that took place on the south shores of Cuba in April 1961. America’s involvement consisted of assisting Cuban exiles in trying to overtake Fidel Castro’s newly seized Communist Cuban government. This involvement has been viewed by many as an utter failure. Set in motion late in the Eisenhower administration, it was put in action under a newly elected President Kennedy who along with the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) would take the bulk of the blame for the failed insurrection. This essay will revolve around the events that led up to the Bay of Pigs invasion, what happened during the invasion, and the aftermath of one of the most frightening periods of time in American history.
In 1959 Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba to overthrow Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista himself was a dictator, but he posed no immediate threat to America. In fact he was pro-America and an ally that allowed U.S. companies to own nearly half of Cuban sugar plantations, the majority of its cattle ranches, mines and utilities. Castro was largely everything opposite of Batista. Castro was a communist who, upon seizing control of Cuba, immediately did what he could...

...The Bay of Pigs was one of the main events that made the cold war. One of the causes of the Bay of Pigs incident was the USSR spreading communism to Cuba which then caused the Americans to bring in the policy of containment. Another cause of the Bay of Pigs was the revolutionary changes that occurred in Cuba when Fidel Castro came into power. An important consequence of the Bay ofPigs incident was the Cuban missile crisis. Another important consequence was when U.S.A and the USSR agreed on the molink test ban treaty.
The United States declared the policy of containment in 1946. They used this policy to try stop and stall the spread of communism. Economic and military measures were necessary to prevent the spread of communism to Cuba and other countries. When Cuba turned communist after Fidel Castro overthrew Batista, he made allies with Khrushchev the leader of the USSR. Khrushchev saw Castro as a valuable ally and they became very close as Cuba was 70 miles from the southern tip of the U.S.A. They then became very close as Khrushchev said “any enemy of my enemy is my friend. So the USSR supplied weapons and economic aid to Cuba. Eventually Cuba became the centre of the Cold War’s most serious crisis.
After the revolution Castro came into power. He then expelled the US mafia from Havana. He also made changes in the economy. Shortly after the revolution,...

...and applications of groupthink. Also, he connects his findings on groupthink to political fiascoes and demonstrates that groupthink is the leading cause behind these mishaps. Some of his examples are from foreign policy fiascoes such as the The Bay of Pigs, The Korean War, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since this presentation is very short and limited I have chosen to focus directly on the Bay of Pigs fiasco and show how Janis portrays it as a product of groupthink.
I. Introduction A. Groupthink is a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action (9). B. Thesis: The Bay of Pigs is a United States foreign policy fiasco that is directly related to symptoms of groupthink. C. Forecasting of Key Points: 1. There were six major miscalculations made by the presidential advisory group. 2. There were four key factors why the plan failed according to the group after the fiasco occurred. 3. Janis counters these by proposing that the underlying reason why the plan failed was because of groupthink. II. Body A. The Bay of Pigs was bound to fail due to these six false assumptions made by the advisory committee. 1. No one will know that the United States...

...﻿Introduction
I. Bay of Pigs. Bay, Pigs; what's wrong with Bays or Pigs? What if I told you that the Bay of Pigs was a piece of history that could have led to the total nuclear annihilation of the United States? What if I told you that the Bay of Pigs was a piece of history that happened because of a Russian backed communist country? TheBay of Pigs was tied to a piece of history during the US/Russian cold war and was a point in time where the probability of a nuclear war was at its all-time highest.
II. Does the sound of allowing US citizens, US allies and US companies the right to do business with communist Cuba after a 50 year trade embargo sound like a good solution for inserting democracy and free market?
In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower halted American imports of Cuban sugar and cut off trade to Cuba. This was the beginning of the Cuban trade embargo. As a result Fidel Castro turned to Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev for economic assistance, and the Soviets bought increasing amounts of Cuban sugar and supported the Cuban communist party. Convinced that Castro was a puppet of the Soviets and that this was the first step toward communist control of the Caribbean, the Eisenhower administration prepared plans to overthrow the new Cuban leader according to the Encyclopedia of American...

...The Bay of Pigs- Causes of Conflict
When people, leaders, or officials are afraid or dislike something, they usually try to get rid of the source of the problem. Back in the 1960’s, communism was a problem or a fear of almost every country living in the western hemisphere. And when Fidel Castro, a young Cuban nationalist took control of the country, US officials had a reason to be afraid. You see, Castro was a communist, and he wanted Cuba to be a communist country and he would get rid of US influence in his country. But Cuba is in the United State’s sphere of influence which would mean that they would crack down on any country trying to become communist. The US had a plan to overthrow Castro’s government and put in a democratic, US friendly government. So on April 17, 1961, 1400 Cuban exiles backed by the US government launched an attack on Cuba because of the political, geographical and economical issues that they had.
One factor that caused the Bay of Pigs invasion was the political problems that Castro would be causing to the United States when he took control of the country. Fidel Castro was a communist nationalist that didn't like the way that the US used Cuba for their business and interests in Cuba. Castro also established relations with the Soviet Union and turned Cuba into a communist country. The United States also distrusted Castro and felt that he was a threat to their interests and was thinking about...